


when good men go to war

by ApprenticeofDoyle



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, BAMF John Watson, Character Study, Depression, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, addiction mention, tagged for major character death because Holmes is seen as dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26070388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApprenticeofDoyle/pseuds/ApprenticeofDoyle
Summary: "My hands fell to my lap. I cradled the pipe within them, its weight heavy and cool. I traced the new crack trailing down the wood, and my heart thudded a slow, heavy, painful rhythm.What would you do?I thought, thumb smoothing across its surface, wishing it were his hand instead.What do I do, without you?"Holmes leaves behind a grieving partner and a towering legacy. Watson, days after Switzerland, uncovers one last secret in Baker Street, and contemplates his future without Holmes.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 21
Kudos: 66





	when good men go to war

**when good men go to war**

It had been a week, and I could not sleep.

The flat was so quiet. Every time my conscious mind began to slip off the precipice of awareness, the silence shook me awake. At the edge of nothing, my ears would strain for sound—for the low screech of an adjusted chord, for the suck and low puff of a pipe—and my heart would pound in my chest as though gripped by a fist. My palms would go sweat-damp and my throat would constrict around memories of swallowed cries and shouts across the falls. Behind closed eyes all I would see is cliff mud and the white mists, the white bloodless stretch of bone and flesh below black water.

Sleep eluded me, but I needed it desperately. I couldn’t carry on as I was. I knew all too well the effects of sleeplessness on a healthy mind, even on minds of genius, and how much the shaken and grieving required rest. And that was what I was, now. The grieving. I had borne the burden of the category before, but never had it kept me awake like this. After Mother, I drank. As did Father, as did Harry. It was their behavior, throwing things and bellowing at each other, which had eventually scared me into sobriety. After Father’s death, I enlisted: perhaps, in retrospect, an even more dangerous method of coping. And after Harry...after Harry, I turned to cards, and as a result my pension had dwindled until Stamford introduced me to a roommate with a cabinet that would lock and an owner that would mind my chequebook.

But this, I believed, was my most lethal response to date. The inability to sleep. The toll on my body was palpable. Time and reality sludged like tar around my eyes, and my pulse hammered nauseatingly beneath my skin and behind my eyes like it had on the front lines, when the Afghans shifted in the night beyond sight, when drifting off could have meant death for myself and my countrymen. My stomach twisted and turned, full of bile and acid but nothing of substance, and my thoughts swam in heavy eddies. 

I _needed_ sleep. And yet fixed I remained, in the dark of the sitting room, curled in my study with the fireplace dead and the twin chair in front of me empty. The sight of it _hurt,_ so deeply and so fiercely that my vision blurred into grey-scale watercolor.

 _Fool man,_ I thought, vengefully, tears sliding unbidden down my face. My eyes stung but I didn't bother to wipe them. No one was there to see, or to conceal them from. _You could have told me._

The chair was voiceless, as silent and vacant as the rest of the flat. I _longed_ for sound, grieving at the loss of it.

 _Why didn’t you tell me?_ My hands dug into the meat of my thighs. My bad leg hollered at the treatment, but the pain was bright and noisy and sharpened the slurry of my vision into stark, awful clarity. _Why didn’t you trust me?_

Teeth gritted, my eyes fell upon the pipe lying dormant and unused on the table beside me. Holmes had smoked it the day before we'd left, face layered with a seriousness I only now realized the extent of. I’d noticed straight away, that it was the ebony black pipe. Holmes only smoked that one in the direst of occasions. I’d noticed, but said nothing. Had trusted that if it was important, if there was something to be done to help, Holmes would have confided in me.

 _Who’s the fool,_ I thought, and in a fit of sudden, terrible rage, I seized the pipe and hurled it at the mantle. The second it left my fingertips, regret struck my gut like a blow, and the crack of it against the fireplace siding daggered my stomach with dread. I lurched, stricken, from my seat and staggered to where it lay fallen upon the hardwood. I bent, fingers brushing around the pipe and lifting it with apologetic slowness. 

A spindling fissure now wound up its worn and polished stem. My eyes burned with tears. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. My throat caught on a sob. “I’m _—_ ”

I closed my eyes, fingers curling around the pipe with trembling care. My heart yawned and swelled, seizing between my lungs. The world tilted around me, pressing in too close and unsteadying my knees, and I threw out an arm to catch myself on the mantelpiece, fingernails carving into the wood as my leg gave out. I clutched the pipe to my chest with my free hand, face twisting in pain. _Careless. Useless._

I cracked open my eyes to the ashy black of the fireplace grate, thoughts sluggish and poisoned. _I must sleep,_ I thought. _I can’t keep on like this. He wouldn’t—_

My eyes tripped on a sliver of white. I blinked tired tears out of my eyes, clenching my jaw through discomfort to straighten up and wipe my face. Squinting in the dark at the grate, my eyes narrowed on the white that caught my attention. I frowned and mindlessly reached for a poker. Digging into the cold, week-old ash, I encouraged the white scrap onto the floor in streaks of ash that Mrs. Hudson would scowl over. I bent again, wincing, and retrieved the scrap, lifting it to my face. 

It was small and smudged, charred at the edges. A cornerpiece of letter paper, by the look of it. I didn’t recall seeing Holmes burning anything the day we left. I certainly hadn’t. Gingerly, I found myself limping over to Holmes’s work desk. Scrounging a lighter from my pocket, I lit the well-used votives on Holmes’s desk to examine the paper scrap. Thick stock, I noticed wearily, exhausted mind struggling to employ the methods Holmes had drilled in me. Cream color. More expensive than the usual cornerstore lot, but not embossed or ostentatious like that of an aristocrat’s. Professional paper, then, from an upper-class businessman.

I flipped it over. There were letters in ichor-black ink, stretching in an elegant scrawl.

I drew it close to the flame and read. My stomach plummeted in my chest.

 _“—or the good doctor dies’,_ it said. And at the bottom, in an illustrious curling print, initials. 

_JM._

My eyes flooded. Something split apart in my chest, bleeding horror, and I buried his face in my hands.

It couldn’t be true _._

I could, eventually, live with Holmes lying to me. Leaving me out of the loop, half blind and bumbling behind him as he had done so many times before. But I could not bear this. I could not live with this. _Please._

_It can’t have been for me._

“Fool man,” I choked out, voice broken, hand spasming around the pipe like a talisman. He would have. It was very likely the truth of it, and its reality cleaved into me, more efficient and debilitating than a fallen axe. He would have. For all that Holmes did not say, for all that I didn’t express myself: Holmes would have done it. He would have faced that villain, that _devil_ on the cliffside alone with my life on the line. It was possible. It was more than possible.

I crushed the pipe close, a sob clogging my throat. I wanted to fall down and weep. I wanted to kick a chair and rage. I wanted to scream at Holmes, scream myself hoarse, _how could you, how could you leave me this way, how could you trade your life for mine and leave me to this world alone._ I wanted to throw a punch, glance my knuckles across a pale cheekbone, I wanted to take his collar in my fist and _shake_. I wanted to say everything I hadn’t. I wanted to beg forgiveness, for not having been clever enough to save him in time. For not having _seen._

But more than anything, I wanted none of it to have happened at all. I wanted it all to be a dream. That, perhaps, was why I couldn’t bear to go to sleep. There was no deeper despair than going to bed and waking in the morning to a nightmare that had not ended. That would never end.

Holmes was dead. 

And for what? To stop a monster, true. To save lives, to save _my_ life. But Moriarty was the crowned head of the hydra. Holmes had said himself that he led a network that spanned England and the entire Continent. Holmes was dead and his last, noble act had been to take the Prince of Crime with him. But he had left the rest. Had left _me,_ alone. In that moment, in the quiet tomb of what used to be my life with the man I loved, it did not seem worth it.

_“My dear Watson.”_

That beloved, sonorous voice spilled into my mind, an invisible apparition of grief. _God, I must sleep,_ I thought, and bit down a chuckle of near-hysteria _. I’m going mad._

“ _Watson,”_ that voice entreated again, and even in my mind, the sound of his name in that voice, that knowing tone, fluttered in my breast. “ _He had to be stopped.”_

 _But not at the cost of you,_ I thought back, unable to resist chiding back even if he lived only in my head. I felt weak. Like fractured china. _Not at the cost of you, who was worth so much more to the world, who was worth so much more to_ me.

 _“He would not have given up,”_ Holmes said, calm and so close to fond that it ached within me _. “I was a threat. He would have kept coming, Watson. You know now that he threatened you. Eventually, had I not faced him, he would have struck out against us both. I had no choice.”_

 _We could have stopped him,_ I insisted, brittle, half-pleading. _We could have stopped him together._

“ _He was as gifted in criminal strategy as I was in unraveling it. Perhaps even more so. I could not risk your life as well, when I was already uncertain my own would be preserved.”_

 _You couldn’t have known it,_ I thought, inner voice a hiss. _You couldn’t have been so sure of your failure. It could have gone the other way round! You could have been safe!_

 _“And you could have been lost.”_ In my mind, Holmes was gentle. Perhaps gentler than he ever was in life. _“Where would I be without my Boswell?”_

 _Alive,_ I told him, and I became aware that I was weeping, dripping fat tears onto Holmes’s chemical stained desk. _He threatened me. You went. Without me—_

_“My dear man. He would have come for me anyway. Through my brother. Through an innocent. He would have had me somehow, but taking aim at you was merely the easiest way to secure my compliance.”_

_I’m sorry. I’m so sorry._

“ _You could not have helped me, Watson. I did not let you.”_ I bowed my head, eyes burning. “ _Please, my dear fellow. Take care of yourself. I did not do battle with the devil to lose you after all was done.”_

 _You should have thought of that beforehand,_ I thought, and meant it to be cruel. Silence greeted me then, seeping in from the uncaring room around me, and I almost regretted spurning Holmes’s spectre even knowing it was a fiction. Baker Street was so quiet. I missed him in my bones, and I thought then I might have done anything to keep him, even if he were only a fragment of my own mind.

But the truth of it was, the memory of Holmes did not speak because he had nothing more to say. Nothing that I could truly believe, nothing that I could hear without breaking apart completely. He was right, had always been right, but I could not accept it. Not his logic, not his care, not my own damned medical mind, because why in God’s name should I look after myself when I had no one left in this world to live for? When the only family I had left had died to end a villain who lived on in cruel, criminal lessers cast across the globe? What was the point? 

For so long, being at Holmes’s side has been my purpose. What did I amount to now? A crippled soldier without a war, a doctor who couldn’t even care to look after himself, a rough-shod, heart-struck writer of a greater man’s exploits, one who'd been lost in his own war against injustice.

I looked through bleary eyes at his desk, at the station of his work. It had provided him more assistance in his crusade against London’s criminal element than I had. Maybe it was uncharitable, to compare myself to an inanimate object; I knew that Holmes had appreciated my help. But I was aware that my position at his side had been earned through loyalty, not utility. I had been lucky to witness what I had, friend to brilliance that never had and would never again shine upon this earth. 

My gaze continued to trail numbly across our flat, across his things, items I could never bear to pack away. I couldn’t live amongst them, maintain a memorial like some haunted widow, but I could not...I could not just shove it all away out of sight. This was our home. Furthermore, I couldn’t fathom living anywhere else. 

But I also never had imagined I would ever live in a Baker Street without Holmes. 

_Perhaps Mycroft could store some of it,_ I thought. After the funeral, we had exchanged a few words. For all that that the elder espoused the stoicism of his family line, he had been exceedingly kind to me in our parting. His thanks for the years of friendship I had offered his brother had been enough to nearly drive me to tears in a public setting; it was only through pride and the knowledge he’d be made uncomfortable by my distress that I had restrained myself.

My eyes found his archives, and my heart overturned, submerging in bitterness. Within those files were years of Holmes’s work. Work that would never be finished or appreciated. Names of Moriarty’s syndicate were in that disorganized trove. Blackmailers, mercenaries, thieves, blackguards of the lowest order. I pondered the idea of giving them to Lestrade, but my mind shied away from the idea with immediate, twisting discomfort. Holmes would have been disgusted to have his precious findings go to the Yard, even considering the firm acquaintanceship he’d managed to forge with Lestrade. No. Even if he was gone, I could not ignore what his preferences would have been. As to what those were...

Perhaps it was pride that drew me to think so, but I fancied, maybe, that Holmes would not mind if I kept them. Part of me wanted to keep everything myself, hoard his belongings away from the fingers of others who had not known or understood the man they’d belonged to. If Mycroft asked, I could not deny blood ties, but no, no one else. I would be selfish with Holmes’s things now, even if I’d been too cowardly in his lifetime to be selfish _with_ him.

But what would I do with it all? His treatises, his writings, those I could not part with, but could I even stomach to read them? Maybe eventually I would have the strength to decrypt his handwriting again, but at that moment, I did not trust myself not to ruin his scattered journals with salt water. His maps I would keep: they were useful and moreover, some were sentimental. His pipes? I gripped the one in my hand. No, they would remain, as would that blasted Persian slipper. His books? Maybe some of them, some I felt would be better used by scholars in a university library. His disguises? What the devil I could do with them, I couldn’t say. I fought a creaky laugh at the idea of giving them to Lestrade for undercover bobbies, and wheezed a little harder at the idea of a plainclothesman in a bar wearing one of Holmes’s preposterous sailor outfits. Good Lord, we had a priest’s vestment somewhere...

And his notes. What would I do with those? They were an unimaginable mess but they were no doubt a treasury of information on London’s criminal underbelly. What could I possibly do with such material? What would I even find?

 _Names,_ a low voice issued in my mind. And it was not the cultured voice of Holmes that spoke to me now, but a mirror of my own, cold and sharp.

_Names of his people. Of men who worked for him. Men who still walk free._

_Criminals. Men who’ll go unpunished._

_Men who may have helped Moriarty force Holmes to Switzerland. Who helped him drive Holmes to his death._

Ice poured into my veins. My ears rang like a mortar round had been fired above my head. 

There were men out there who could be responsible, in some way, for Holmes’s demise. Blackguards who would have happily shoved him off the precipice under Moriarty’s orders themselves. The idea was so unacceptable that my entire body seemed paralyzed with it, with horror and injustice and a rage so monstrous and painful that I could scarcely see. My hands spasmed with sudden violence, fingers twitching for the handle of my service pistol. If one of them stood in front of me now— 

The next moment had the urge whistling out of me like wind through an open window, leaving me empty and cold. Revenge would not serve me. It would only leave me angrier and colder than I was before. And Holmes...Holmes could never approve of his research being used in such a way. Not for vengeance, no, not such a petty, futile, mortal motive.

But for justice. That would be permissible. Holmes would allow me that, wherever he existed now. I believed, even if he hadn’t, that good men found peace after death, and I believed too that eventually, I would find him again. 

But not if I fell to hatred that would consume me. I had seen what had become of my fellow men as the fighting went on, when their souls cried for payment for the brothers they’d lost in the form of greater, more despicable violence. It had broken them. I did not think I could be more broken, but I was not willing to test fate more than it had already tested me.

My eyes returned to the archives in the dark corner of the flat, drawn as if by magnetic pull. Cynicism welled in my stomach. I’d be lucky if I could manage a damn thing with his notes, let alone justice. I was not Holmes. I was not the detective. I did not possess his powers, his knowledge, his energy, his dedication. I’d be lucky to manage rent payments on 221B doubling my clinic hours! I would not even have the _time_ to try waging some sort of vendetta against whatever remained of Moriarty’s people in-country, let alone the capability. I was fooling myself. I was grieving. I needed sleep—

_Can you sleep knowing they’re out there?_

That voice, that dark twin of my own, rose up again in my mind like a shadow. Its words shook me, rattling me to my marrow.

Could I? Could I sleep?

My hands fell to my lap. I cradled the pipe within them, its weight heavy and cool. I traced the new crack trailing down the wood, and my heart thudded a slow, heavy, painful rhythm.

 _What would you do?_ I thought, thumb smoothing across its surface, wishing it were his hand instead.

_What do I do, without you?_

* * *

The next morning, I awoke in my bed.

Holmes was still dead.

But his mission, I found, was not.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write the scene where Watson determines to follow Holmes's footsteps so BADLY but I know there's so much left to tell. Considering making this a short series of vignettes and one-shots cataloguing Watson solo—with Ms. Hudson, Lestrade, Mycroft, and the Irregulars all playing a role—up to the Empty House (and maybe after, in light of his character growth during Holmes's three years away). Thoughts?
> 
> If you liked the story, drop a comment below or reach out to me on tumblr @apprenticeofdoyle or @biwatson <3 I'm always down to gush about SH or JW.


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